Funding: Rebtel gets $20 million

By Vivek Puri | September 24th, 2006 at 01:09 am ET         

Rebtel, the VoIP startup providing cheap international calls, has received $20 million funding from Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital. Rebtel, located at Luxembourg, was co-founded by Hjalmar Winbladh and Jonas Lindroth.
 
Rebtel charges $1 USD per week for its service and you are charged only for the weeks you use the service. Basically Rebtel converts all the calls to local calls. What this means is that you get a local phone number, according to where you live, to call your friend abroad, and your friend abroad gets a local phone number, according to where they live, to call you. Now you dial the local number for your friend, who than answers the phone and gets your local number. He than hangs up within 30 seconds and calls your local number. This way, two local calls are automatically connected, in what is called as REBroom. This is all you and your friend need to pay for are the local calls and can talk away as long as you like without giving any per-minute fee to Rebtel.
 
Above service is called REBin. Right now REBin is free for 35 countries including US, UK, Germany, France,…. If your friend does not hang-up your initial call within 30 seconds, you will be making REBout call, which have a charge on per-minute basis depending on your friend’s country.
 
 Concept behind using Rebtel is bit tricky to get around initially, but can save you quite a few bucks. Best part about Rebtel is that unlike other mobile VoIP options you don’t  require a pc after initial signup or downloads to mobile or new SIM cards. Everything works right from your mobile phone.
 
[via]

Links:
Rebtel
How it Works

Tags: StartupSquad, VoIP, Funding